Seeing is believing
Tom Sutcliffe
WAGNER by Michael Tanner HarperCollins, £16.99, pp. 236
Michael Tanner brings to Wagner the instincts of a teacher of philosophy. He wants to try to answer some questions, sorting out the odd mystery and misappre- hension about an artist whose creative work he finds rich, fruitful and provocative. He has to hack his way through under- growth first before he gets on the right path, as he sees it (tangling with Rodney MiMes and Barry Millington without expending much energy — but they are unworthy targets).
I would go along with many of his perceptions. But I am surprised to find how limited his resources are and how cramped his imaginative response. The reason for that, I suspect, is the fashionable and common agnosticism on which he attempts to base his own view of things. His academ- ic discipline is to try to think clearly and define reasonably. His discovery, as out- lined in this little book, of a kind of faith in Wagner in fact amounts to the tentative acknowledgment of an instinct within him- self that most people would recognise as religious. He finds that the operas are pro- claiming a message (however ambiguous) about a world renewed by love.
He does not regard Wagner's usual scenario as tragedy. He does not see Wagner as continuing the metaphysical programme first adumbrated by Mozart in Don Giovanni: the awful burden of human responsibility in a world where God is dead, or apparently silent: for Mozart the Don's refusal to repent is both heroic, tragic and emblematic. Tanner has very limited language to address moral issues, and rests his case on Schopenhauer and the Will in a manner that begs all sorts of dramatic questions and (though convenient and facile under the circumstances) is real- ly not very helpful. He has, thank God, a
proper view of the relation between Wagner's theorising in his prose works and letters (the latter generally more humane and practical) and the independent achievement and vitality of the operas. So the discussion of those theatre works is intelligent and open-minded, and always subject to his overriding musical response, as it should be.
But he does make awfully heavy weather sometimes of his attempt to apply a literary critical response to material that he has not sufficiently experienced as Wagner intend- ed. What is missing is that he is not an opera critic, or Wagner enthusiast, with much theatrical mileage. He probably should not even have a pilot's licence yet. He writes as a child of the gramophone and television age. Wagner, however, intended his operas for theatrical perfor- mance, was in fact a committed reformer of the theatre. It is not appropriate, as Tanner does, to trust to the limited imaginative options of the theatre in your mind's eye especially when the experimental dialectic of theatre is something you so firmly resist.
Almost all the time he talks of hearing Wagner, not seeing it. He simply doesn't allow for the way that imagination and memory are crucial to the moral debates in every one of Wagner's operas. He doesn't see how Wagner's extended memorial monologues are doing the same job as the confessional arias in baroque operas, that in opera characters are what they sing not something apart, of which their singing is a possibly misleading symptom. He seems to accept the fallacy of decorum that the life of theatrical performance on which every opera composer has always counted could betray or negate the work. If he were more sympathetic to the theatre he would know that it is not a museum, cannot be a museum, but is a crucible, a forum for practical discernment. And he would know that performance is not a matter of right and wrong but of life and death — of the material.
So this book is based on an unreliable, indeed dangerous, idealisation of Wagner's works, rather than of the man. The 'domestication' of the operas in theatrical performance of which Tanner complains is what would better be called 'incarnation' with theological resonance. Though opera is a narrative form, like novels and films, it is usually — however naturalistic it purports to be — on some other surrepti- tious tack. Yet for Tanner performance is not a matter of acting and imagery, but of mechanical, naive reproduction.
Because he receives the information in a musical rather than a theatrical vein, he simply does not get the point that Wagner was making — because Wagner was a mas- ter of theatrical possibilities. To suggest that Elizabeth's prayer in Tannhduser Act III is a capitulation to the values of the Warburg seems a total misreading. Eliza- beth's death is a redeeming self-sacrifice. Tanner regards baroque opera as super- ficial and ridiculous, whereas Wagner's main theme in The Ring about the respon- sible ruler was one of the most popular issues in the world of Metastasio.
The trouble is that Tanner comes to Wagner as a student (and teacher) of Nietzsche. I wish he hadn't used the phrase 'of course' on page 138, since of course most of us haven't read Nietzsche. Tanner doesn't understand Christianity, and more damagingly doesn't understand Wagner's relationship to Christianity, his use of it as an imaginative resource. That was what Nietzsche couldn't stand, as systematically improper. On page 136, Tanner confesses to a weak grasp of 'the concept of courage'. If he were able to come to terms with various forms of contemporary Christian theology, he would see that the central problem in Wagner's religious thinking was the 'impassability' of God. If God is all- powerful and all-knowing, is he impervious to suffering? Can his creatures, human beings, cause him grief? Tanner unfortu- nately is not stirred by the Christian way of answering certain philosophical problems, but his blindness in this area limits his vision of the debate in which Wagner is engaged in The Ring, Tristan, Parsifal and The Meistersinger. It is also very strange to find such a subtle critic so ignorant of the poetic identification of death and orgasm, and so uninterested in the tradition of suf- fering, courtly love in mediaeval literature — on which Wagner drew gratefully, since it chimed so well with his understanding.
Finally, I find it strange that Tanner should buy the notion of Siegfried and Briinnhilde's love as realistic, because musically so ripe. There really is a problem with BrUnnhilde's memory which he doesn't address. She was at her most human when she disobeyed Wotan and responded to Siegmund's rejection of Val- halla: she is at her most unappealing when she condemns Siegfried in the Act II trio with Giinther and Hagen. Wagner felt, like Nietzsche, that the world needed super- human talent to save it. The rather tortu- ous Rilke quotation on page 199 that Tan- ner so likes is in the end a statement about exercising responsibility — and central to the Christian understanding of incarnation. How can we, and do we, confront the terri- ble tasks all around? The hope embedded in Wagner's music dramas somehow adds to our means.
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